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Chapter 5 - Uncertainties and Their Impact on Healthcare Decisions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

Ramalingam Shanmugam
Ramalingam Shanmugam
Affiliation:
Texas State University, San Marcos
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Summary

First, let us examine the role of uncertainty in scientific inquiries in general and in healthcare decision-making in particular. Weurlander (2020) warns physicians to be careful to deal with uncertainty before making decisions to treat patients. Koffman et al. (2020) discuss reasons for involving uncertainty in healthcare, especially with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. Uncertainty is not easily defined because of inadequate, incomplete, and ambiguous information.

Many occurrences in personal and professional life exhibit patterns of complete unpredictability – climate, disease outbreaks, financial volatility, natural disasters. Especially in healthcare, a specified outcome might be seen or missing. This vagueness is framed as uncertainty and raises fundamental challenges. Understanding how uncertainties appear is perhaps the beginning of solving this issue. Like an atom can be decomposed to its constituent parts of electrons, neutrons, and protons, the probability of uncertainty can be decomposed to its axioms. Refer to Camio et al. (2019) and Scoones (2019) for more discussion of how uncertainty is identified and illustrated.

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Data-Guided Healthcare Decision Making , pp. 107 - 155
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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